Sitting with Japandroids outside of comfort-food haven Moonshine during this year’s SXSW, it’s hard not to notice the dark red, fresh-looking cut across the right side of singer/guitarist Brian King’s nose. Turns out that, after downing a few beers the previous night, he decided to free himself from the rings of festival wristbands lining his arm… by slicing them off with a rather large kitchen knife. So he stuck the blade between his skin and the paper bracelets and jerked it up so hard that it landed on his face. Still, it could’ve been a lot worse. King finishes his story by showing me a small speck of a scab where the knife’s point hit, smack in the middle of his eyelid. “I was an idiot and I paid the price,” says the animated, fast-talking frontman. “It’s not the first time.”

Pitchfork: When Celebration Rock was announced, a lot of people were like, “It took long enough.”

Dave Prowse: That’s how we felt, too.

Pitchfork: Do you feel like you complement each other well, personality-wise?

BK: It’s a hard question to answer, because this is the only band we’ve ever played in. Sometimes, I would answer: “We don’t at all, in fact we actually question why we’re even doing this together.” And other times it’s just a no brainer why we’re doing it. It’s no question that it’s difficult, though– it’s not always just two best bros agreeing on everything all the time. But I think it would be even more complicated if anyone else was involved.

AKI

Pitchfork: The album is called Celebration Rock, and the overall vibe is very 2 a.m., six-beers-in, time-of-your-life sort of thing. But there’s a lot more ambiguity in the lyrics this time, like you’re battling with this idea of being in a band and on tour, and how that can be strange.

BK: I’m doing my best to remove those specific band-y tour references and trying to make them more about movement, or something that’s more identifiable in general. Like, you may never go on tour, but you might decide to move away from your hometown or go to school somewhere that’s far away, or you might have a break up and go somewhere else, or you may have had a rough week at work and need to blow off some steam and get outta town for the weekend. Just that idea of movement as a measure of personal well-being.

Pitchfork: A lot of the lyrics on the album take advantage of this universal, mythic rock’n’roll language, like on “Fire’s Highway”: “Hearts from hell collide/ On fire’s highway tonight/ We dreamed it, now we know.”

BK: Personally, I really like the concepts of good and evil, heaven and hell– the extreme boundaries of how people can feel and how fast things can change. I like that that language. I’m not talking about just some night you felt a certain way, I’m talking about the night you felt that way– that one time. People have always alluded to those extremes as a way of characterizing the most intense feelings since blues and the early days of rock. A blues singer won’t be like, “We broke up.” He’ll say, “Satan stole my baby from me.” You just pick it up.

AKI

Pitchfork: Are you guys more committed to the band now, or is everything still kind of up in the air?

BK: We were committed to the record and we did that. But we’re still gonna be figuring it out as we go.